She stood beneath Archie’s tail, enjoying the flood of images rushing from the arrowhead fluke toward the tips of the two long hunting tentacles. Something about Victorian girls in their underwear had just passed, and she wondered if that was part of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film which Inchmale had been fond of sampling on DVD for preshow inspiration. Someone had cooked a beautifully lumpy porridge of imagery for Bobby, and she hadn’t noticed it loop yet. It just kept coming.

And standing under it, head conveniently stuck in the wireless helmet, let her pretend she wasn’t hearing Bobby hissing irritably at Alberto for having brought her here.

It seemed almost to jump, now, with a flowering rush of silent explosions, bombs blasting against black night. She reached up to steady the helmet, tipping her head back at a particularly bright burst of flame, and accidentally encountered a control surface mounted to the left of the visor, over her cheekbone. The Shinjuku squid and its swarming skin vanished.

Beyond where it had been, as if its tail had been a directional arrow, hung a translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp yet insubstantial. It was large, long enough to park a car or two in, and easily tall enough to walk into, and something about these dimensions seemed familiar and banal. Within it, too, there seemed to be another form, or forms, but because everything was wireframed it all ran together visually, becoming difficult to read.

She was turning, to ask Bobby what this work in progress might become, when he tore the helmet from her head so roughly that she nearly fell over.

This left them frozen there, the helmet between them. Bobby’s blue eyes loomed owl-wide behind diagonal blondness, reminding her powerfully of one particular photograph of Kurt Cobain. Then Alberto took the helmet from them both. “Bobby,” he said, “you’ve really got to calm down. This is important. She’s writing an article about locative art. For Node.”

“Node?”

“Node.”

“The fuck is Node?”

I just finished building that. A poor man’s version of that, at least – there’s more to do, but you can stand it up in a couple of seconds and it works; a Node-based Flyweb discovery service that serves up a discoverable VR environment.

It was harder than I expected – NPM and WebVR are pretty uneven experiences from a novice web-developer’s perspective, and I have exciting opinions about the state of the web development ecosystem right now – but putting that aside: I just pushed the first working prototype up to Github a few minutes ago. It’s crude, the code’s ugly but it works; a 3D locative virtual art gallery. If you’ve got the right tools and you’re standing in the right place, you can look through the glass and see another world entirely.

Maybe the good parts of William Gibson’s visions of the future deserve a shot at existing too.

All of this was true before, but we’re going to highlight it on the homepage and make it explicit in the wiki; we want Planet to stay what it is, open, participatory, an equal and accessible platform for everyone involved, but we also don’t want Planet to become an attack surface, against Mozilla or anyone else, and won’t allow that to happen out of willful blindness or neglect.

If you’ve got any questions or concerns about this, feel free to leave a comment or email me.

I bought the French press at a garage sale for $3, so altogether that setup cost me about $120 Canadian, and reliably made very good, if not world-class, coffee. After a while I found the 5 minutes of hand-powered grinding kind of tedious first thing in the morning, though, so I started looking around.

At one point I bought and immediately returned a Cuisinart coffee grinder; it had more than a few design flaws that I soon learned were common across much of that product category. After I realized that, I took the time to lay out my requirements:

No custom and hard-to-clean receptacle for the grinds. In particular, a grinder that won’t work without that specific container inserted just so is out.

Set-and-forget on the burr grinder. I’m the only coffee drinker in the house, so I want one button that does the right thing when I push it.

Super-easy cleanup. Aeropress cleanup is easier than the French press, but not a lot easier, so I set the bar there.

Not ridiculously loud, and

Makes excellent coffee.

After some research and patience this is what I’ve settled on, and now I think I’m set for the foreseeable future. I’m using:

So far I’m very happy with this. The Breville meets all my requirements for a grinder; I’m about four months into owning it and consider it excellent value for money. One nice thing about it is that there’s no intermediate steps; you put the filter in the ceramic dripper, tuck it in under the grinder’s spout and push the button. Once you’ve boiled the water, making the coffee is quick and simple and cleanup could not be easier.

You have to start with excellent whole-bean coffee, clearly, but Toronto is in the middle of some sort of coffee renaissance right now and there are a number (Six? Eight? Maybe more?) of local roasters all doing excellent work, so let your heart guide you.

Bequest was a charmingly understated member of the “[Subject] Quest” games lineage, largely forgotten I suspect for the sin of being a character-driven mystery with a female protagonist rather than a puzzles-and-princesses nature excursion. Teenage Me remembers enjoying it. Present-day Me does not remember Teenage Me as a paragon of good taste and sound judgement, true, but let’s put that aside for the moment.

When the Colonel’s Bequest came out, a friend and I in high school were very much into the Sierra games, but we got our selves thoroughly stuck on this one. To my memory this would have been during that magical late-in-the-school-year part of spring time when teachers have given up on the curriculum and would rather just show you old movies. My English teacher – a magnificent old crank, in that particular way that English teachers close to retirement can blossom into magnificent old cranks – decided he was going to show us old Vincent Price horror movies, because why not.

One of those he played for us was The House Of Usher, closely based on the similarly-named Poe story. It’s a classic-in-the-classic-sense horror film; an iconic product of it’s time, though that time hasn’t aged spectacularly well. Apparently the US National Film Registry regards it as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, though, and if you get a chance to watch it, dated as it seems, you’ll probably agree.

Until then my only exposure to Price had been “The Hilarous House Of Dr. Frightenstein” on PBS, reruns of Price well into his self-parody phase. Despite the fact that even then I could tell there was a joke going on I wasn’t getting, I could talk about that show at great and unreasonably enthusiastic length – its very possible The Professor had a formative influence on my eight-year-old self – but that is not what I am here to talk about.

What I’m here to talk about it how clearly I can remember that moment when the lights came on and both of us knew that we knew how to win the game. Because the architecture of the mansion and surrounding grounds in Bequest, blowing our tiny teenage minds, was very strongly influenced – straight-up cribbed, in some places – from the architecture of the eponymous House and its grounds in that movie. next time we played the game together we quickly found the hidden doors and switches exactly where they were in the movie, opening the way to the same secret passages; we moved quickly through to the conclusion of the game, and that was it.

I haven’t thought about that moment or that game in 25 years; it surprises me that this newfound ability we have to revisit the specific stimulus of our youth can feel like being ambushed by a choice between nostalgia and introspection. I can remember a few pivotal moments in my life like that, where can remember learning something, making a choice, and knowing that I was different person on the far side of it. There must have been a lot of them. Maybe this is one of them? I’ve had an interest in secret passages and video game architecture for a really long time; I wonder if that’s where it started.

For no particular reason, here’s a picture of a computer with a 1.3Ghz processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, 32 gigabytes of solid-state internal storage and another 32 gigabytes on a MicroSD card, wifi, bluetooth and HDMI video output plugged into a standard 3.5″ floppy drive that would store 1.44MB, or approximately 0.002% of 64 gigabytes.

When you account for inflation, at the time of purchase the floppy drive was about $20 more expensive.

I’ve been holding off on a laptop refresh at work for a while, but it’s time. The recent Apple events have been less than compelling; I’ve been saying for a long time that Mozilla needs more people in-house living day to day on Windows machines and talk is cheaper than ever these days, so.

I’m taking notes here of my general impressions as I migrate from a Macbook Pro to a Surface Book and Windows 10.

I’ll add to them as things progress, but for now let’s get started.

I don’t think highly of unboxing fetishism, but it’s hard to argue against the basic idea that your very tactile first contact with a product should be a good one. The Surface Book unboxing is a bit rough, but not hugely so; there’s the rare odd mis-step like boxes that are harder than necessary to open or tape that tears the paper off the box.

I’ve got the Performance Base on the Surface Pro here; the very slight elevation of the keyboard makes a surprisingly pleasant difference, and the first-run experience is pretty good too. You can tell Microsoft really, really wants you to accept the defaults, particularly around data being sent back to Microsoft, but you can reasonably navigate that to your comfort level it looks like. Hard to say, obvs.

I’m trying to figure out what is a fair assessment of this platform vs. what is me fighting muscle memory. Maybe there’s not a useful distinction to be made there but considering my notable idiosyncrasies I figure I should make the effort. If I’m going to pretend this is going to be useful for anyone but some alternate-universe me, I might as well. This came up in the context of multiple desktops – I use the hell out of OSX multiple desktops, and getting Windows set up to do something similar requires a bit of config twiddling and some relearning.The thing I can’t figure out here is the organizational metaphor. Apple has managed to make four-fingered swiping around multiple desktop feel like I’m pushing stuff around a physical space, but Windows feels like I’m using a set of memorized gestures to navigate a phone tree. This is a preliminary impression, but it feels like I’m going to need to just memorize this stuff.

In a multiple desktops setting, the taskbar will only show you the things running in your current desktop, not all of them? So crazymaking. [UPDATE: Josh Turnath in the comments turns out that you can set this right in the “multitasking” settings menu, where you can also turn off the “When I move one window, move other windows” settings which are also crazymaking. Thanks, Josh!]

If you’re coming off a Mac trackpad and used to tap-to-click, be sure to set the delay setting to “Short delay” or it feels weird and laggy. Long delay is tap, beat, beat, response; if you move the cursor the action vanishes. That, combined with the fact that it’s not super-great at rejecting unintentional input makes it mostly tolerable but occasionally infuriating, particularly if you’ve got significant muscle memory built up around “put cursor here then move it aside so you can see where you’re typing”, which makes it start selecting text seemingly at random. It’s way better than any other trackpad I’ve ever used on a PC for sure, so I’ll take it, but still occasionally: aaaaaaargh. You’re probably better just turning tap-to-click off. UPDATE: I had to turn off tap to click, because omgwtf.

In this year of our lord two thousand and sixteen you still need to merge in quasi-magic registry keys to remap capslock . If you want mousewheel scrolling to work in the same directions as two-finger scrolling, you need to fire up RegEdit.exe and know the magic incantations. What the hell.

It’s surprising how seemingly shallow the Win10 redesign is. The moment you go into the “advanced options” you’re looking at the the same dialogs you’ve known and loved since WinXP. It’s weird how unfinished it feels in places. Taskbar icons fire off on a single click, but you need to flip a checkbox five layers deep in one of those antiquated menus to make desktop icons do the same. The smorgasbords you get for right-clicking things look like a room full of mismanaged PMs screaming at each other.

You also have to do a bunch of antiquated checkbox clickery to install the Unix subsystem too, but complaining about a dated UI when you’re standing up an ersatz Linux box seems like the chocolate-and-peanut-butter of neckbearded hypocrisy, so let’s just agree to not go there. You can get a Linux subsystem on Windows now, which basically means you can have Linux and modern hardware with working power management and graphics drivers at the same time, which is pretty nice.

This is a common consensus here, after asking around a bit. Perplexity that Microsoft would put an enormous (and ultimately successful) effort into re-pinning and hardening the foundations underneath the house, recladding it and putting in an amazing kitchen, but on the 2nd floor the hinges on the wrong side of the doors and there’s a stair missing on the way to the basement.

I’m not surprised the Windows Store isn’t the go-to installer mechanism yet – that’s true on Macs, too – but my goodness pickings there are pretty slim. Somehow I have to go visit all these dodgy-looking websites to get the basic-utilities stuff sorted out, and it feels like an outreach failure of some kind. This is vaguely related to my next point, that:

The selection of what does vs. doesn’t come preinstalled is… strange. I feel like Microsoft has space to do something really interesting here that they’re not capitalizing on for some reason. Antitrust fears? I dunno. I just feel like they could have shipped this with, say, Notepad++ and a few other common utilities preinstalled and made a lot of friends.

The breakaway power cables are fantastic. A power brick with fast-charge USB built in and freeing up slots on the machine proper is extremely civilized. You can be sitting with your legs crossed and have the power plugged in, which I sincerely miss being able to do with underpowered 1st-gen Macbook Air chargers back in the mists of prehistory.

The Surface Dock is basically perfect. Power, Ethernet, two DisplayPorts and four USB ports over that same breakaway cable is excellent. If you’ve ever used a vintage IBM Thinkpad docking station, this is something you’ve been wishing Apple would make for the better part of a decade.

I assumed “Skype Preview” was a preview version of Skype. I wanted (and pay for) the whole thing, so I immediately uninstalled that and installed normal Skype, which it turns out is really outdated-looking and ugly on Win10. I was bewildered about why a premiere Microsoft-owned thing like Skype would look ugly on their flagship OS, so I did some research and discovered that “Skype Preview” isn’t a preview version of Skype. It’s the prettified modern Win10 version. So I reinstalled it and uninstalled Skype. I’m sure this is somehow my fault for not understanding this but in my defense: words mean things.

This hardware is really nice. The hinge works great, eject to tablet is crisp and works well, reversing it to the easel setup is both surprisingly good and for-real useful.

Anyway, this is where I am so far. More notes as I think of them.

Update:

Definitely turn off the two-finger-tap-to-right-click option – if you don’t and you’ve got fat hands like mine, sometimes it will get into a state where everything is a right-click, which is inexplicable and upsetting.

I saw my first tripped-over USB-C cable send a Macbook crashing to the floor today. I suspect it will not be the last.

Further updates:

It turns out there’s a (baffling!) option to turn a click on the lower right corner of the trackpad into a right-click, which is just super-weird and infuriating if you don’t know it’s there and (apparently?) turned on by default.

The trick to reversing mousewheel scrolling only is here, and involves RegEdit, finding all the instances of FlipFlopWheel in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\ and changing them from 0 to 1. Very user friendly.

A lot of network-related stuff in the Unix subsystem doesn’t work right or at all yet, but my understanding is that this is fixed in the Insider builds.

A nice as having the Unix subsystem is, the terminal thing you use to get to it is infuriating retro-bizarro DOS-window garbage. [UPDATE: bwinton has introduced me to Cmder, a console emulator for Windows that is vastly better than the Ubuntu default in every observable respect. Use that instead.]

Unexpected but pleasant: CPU in the lid instead of the base means your lap doesn’t overheat.

Further-er updates:

A nice touch: searching for common OSX utility names with the taskbar brings you directly to their Windows counterparts, like “grab” brings you to the snippets tool.

It’s surprising how often the “how do I do [something]?” links in the Settings dialog box take you to the same undifferentiated and completely un-navigable Windows 10 support page. Really rookie stuff, like they fired the intern responsible three weeks into their placement and just forgot about it.

It’s really frustrating how both of those experiences coexist basically everywhere in this OS. Nice, elegantly-deployed and useful touches in some places, arbitrarily broken or ill-considered jank in others.

I’ve been batting this around for a few weeks now, ever since I started drafting Free As In Health Care. I’m not sure where to take it at this point, so I’m going to publish it and see what happens. I’d like to thank a number of my friends and colleagues for feedback with this list, but this is high-tension-wire stuff, so I’m not going to do that here. You know who you are and I’m grateful.

“A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.” – Joel Spolsky

One notable part of that early legislation is that for the most part it outlines the minimum standards that must be achieved without specifying how to achieve them; that was left up to the manufacturers’ ingenuity. But those manufacturers needed to prove that they’d met or exceeded all of those standards for that vehicle to go to market.

I believe that we can and should take the same approach to our design decisions about how software treats people. And I think we should be doing that at the very earliest parts of the design and planning stages; like security, like Jobs’ old quote about design, this isn’t a coat of paint you can add later.

To that end, here’s a list of vulnerable user stories. My goal was to end with a preflight checklist developers can quickly run down to give a yes or no (or doesn’t apply) answer to the list of risks or challenges that marginalized and vulnerable people will need to face if they’re navigating a life with this software in it.

This not meant to be comprehensive (or perfect, or finished). All I want to do is set a bar, knowing what we know about social software in 2016. The very lowest bar you have to clear to consider yourself a responsible developer – that is to say, a responsible human being, whose craft happens to be software.

On September 17th, DC “celebrated” what they called “Batman Day”. I do not deploy scare quotes lightly, so let me get this out of the way: Batman is boring. Batman qua Batman as a hero, as a story and as the center of a narrative framework, all of those choices are pretty terrible. The typical Batman story arc goes something like:

Batman is the best at everything. But Gotham, his city, is full of terrible.

Batman broods over his city. The city is full of terrible but Batman is a paragon of brooding justice.

An enemy of justice is scheming at something. Batman detects the scheme, because he is the World’s Greatest Among Many Other Things Detective and intervenes.

Batman is a paragon of brooding justice.

Batman’s attempt to intervene fails! Batman may not be the best at everything!

Batman broods and/or has a bunch of feelings and/or upgrades one of his widgets.

Batman intervenes again, and Batman emerges triumphant! The right kind of punching and/or widgeting makes him the best at everything again.

Order is restored to Gotham.

Batman is a paragon of brooding justice.

If you’re interested in telling interesting stories Batman is far and away the least interesting thing in Gotham. So I took that opportunity to talk about the Batman story I’d write given the chance. The root inspiration for all this was a bout of protracted synesthesia brought on by discovering this take on Batman from Aaron Diaz, creator of Dresden Codak, at about the same time as I first heard Shriekback’s “Amaryllis In The Sprawl”.

The central thesis is this: if you really want a Gritty, Realistic Batman For The Modern Age, then Gotham isn’t an amped-up New York. It’s an amped-up New Orleans, or some sort of New-Orleans/Baltimore mashup. A city that’s full of life, history, culture, corruption and, thanks to relentlessly-cut tax rates, failing social and physical infrastructure. A New-Orleans/Baltimore metropolis in a coastal version of Brownback’s Kansas, a Gotham where garbage isn’t being collected and basic fire & police services are by and large not happening because tax rates and tax enforcement has been cut to the bone and the city can’t afford to pay its employees.

Bruce Wayne, wealthy philanthropist and Gotham native, is here to help. But this is Bruce Wayne via late-stage Howard Hughes; incredibly rich, isolated, bipolar and delusional, a razor-sharp business mind offset by a crank’s self-inflicted beliefs about nutrition and psychology. In any other circumstances he’d be the harmless high-society crackpot city officials kept at arm’s length if they couldn’t get him committed. But these aren’t any other circumstances: Wayne is far more than just generous, but he wants to burn this candle at both ends by helping the city through the Wayne Foundation by day and in his own very special, very extralegal way, fighting crime dressed in a cowl by night.

And he’s so rich that despite his insistence on dressing up his 55-year-old self in a bat costume and beating people up at night, the city needs that money so badly that to keep his daytime philanthropy flowing, six nights a week a carefully selected group of city employees stage another episode of “Batman, crime fighter”, a gripping Potemkin-noir pageant with a happy ending and a costumed Wayne in the lead role.

Robin – a former Arkham psych-ward nurse, a gifted young woman and close-combat prodigy in Wayne’s eyes – is a part of the show, conscripted by Mayor Cobblepot to keep an eye on Wayne and keep him out of real trouble. Trained up by retired SAS Sgt. Alfred Pennyworth behind Wayne’s back, in long-shuttered facilities beneath Wayne Manor that Wayne knows nothing about, she is ostensibly Batman’s sidekick in his fight against crime. But her real job is to protect Wayne on those rare occasions that he runs into real criminals and tries to intervene. She’s got a long, silenced rifle under that cloak with a strange, wide-mouthed second barrel and a collection of exotic munitions that she uses like a surgical instrument, not only to protect Wayne but more importantly to keep him convinced his fists & gadgets work at all.

She and Harleen Quinzel, another ex-Arkham staffer trained by Alfred, spend most of their days planning strategy. They have the same job; Quinn is the sidekick, shepherd and bodyguard of the former chief medical officer of Arkham. Quinn’s charge is also in his twilight years, succumbing to a manic psychosis accelerated by desperate self-administration of experimental and off-label therapies that aren’t slowing the degeneration of his condition, but sure are making him unpredictable. But he was brilliant once, also a philanthropist – the medical patents he owns are worth millions, bequeathed to Gotham and the patients of Arkham, provided the city care for him in his decline. Sometimes he’s still lucid; the brilliant, compassionate doctor everyone remembers. And other times – mostly at night – he’s somebody else entirely, somebody with a grievance and a dark sense of humor.

So Gotham – this weird, mercenary, vicious, beautiful, destitute Gotham – becomes the backdrop for this nightly pageant of two damaged, failing old men’s game of cat and mouse and the real story we’re following is Robin, Quinn, Alfred and the weird desperation of a city so strapped it has to let them play it out, night after dark, miserable night.

Two similar jokes rolled past me late last week, the first when I mentioned that running a Java program in JVM in a Linux VM in a container on AWS is a very inefficient way of generating waste heat, and that I could save a lot of time and effort by cutting out the middleman and just setting money on fire.

For the second, a friend observed that startups are an extremely inefficient way of transferring wealth from venture capitalists to bay-area landlords; there’s a disruptive opportunity here to shortcut that process and just give venture capital directly to the SoCal rentier class for a nominal service fee. I suggested he call his startup “olygarchr”, or maybe “plutocrysii”; you heard it here first, in two years YCombinator will be obsolete.

A while back in Architecture For Loners I wrote a bit about a how in-game architecture can fail a video game’s narrative if you’ve got the right eyes, the right incentives and maybe the right jetpack:

The environments, though… if you have the right eyes you can’t help but notice that built-for-a-shooter feeling that pervades the designed landscapes of that franchise. […] whether it’s a forcefield deployed pointlessly in a cave, an otherwise-empty room with one door and twenty or so alien warriors milling around inside waiting to no discernable purpose or an massive structure of dubious architectural merit built by an advanced alien species whose accomplishments include intergalactic teleporters but not doors, you never have a moment to shake off the sense that the world is built entirely around sight lines.

Like director Hidetaka Miyazaki and company’s previous titles, Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, Bloodborne involves the player in a sublime romance with pre-industrial European architecture. As broadly as mannerism can be described, then, it makes the most sense to place Bloodborne within this particular European lineage.

To get a grasp on what this means, we need to return to Michelangelo, who was as imaginative an architect as he was anything else, and there’s no better example of mannerist elements at play in his work than the Laurentian Library’s vestibule. At first glance, it may seem like an attractive but unremarkable room: essentially a cube with sparsely decorated walls and a staircase. A closer look reveals a number of oddities.

I would have never imagined that the clothing could be so different between Florence and Venice. To document that I had to base a lot off of the paintings of that time period, studying them in great detail to detect the particular differences. For example, the cities had different laws about the kind of neckline women were allowed to wear. In Venice the laws were more lax, and that’s where the courtesan character shows up. None the less, the noblewomen weren’t allowed to go into the streets uncovered in Venice or in Florence. In Florence the men wore a unique hat, while in Venice they didn’t, etc.

Another thing was the hairstyles, that we studied through artists like Botticelli. For example, the ideal beauty in Venice was the blonde woman, so many women dyed their hair. Apart from those more general types of jobs, there was a questionnaire that the artists could fill out to ask me more specific things. All of that appeared in the game.

Let me take a moment to renew my call for a “tourist mode” in video games; I would pay good DLC money for an assisted-walkthrough mode in games like these, that took the time to talk in depth about the why, how, and historical background of their construction and design.